Network Relationship Management (NRM) is a new business discipline that describes the processes used to measure the influence of, and manage contact within, a person's or company's professional network.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) focuses on the processes and tools that a company uses to manage customer information.

NRM recognizes the influence of a company's professional network and helps leverage strong connections, improve weaker connections, and actively manage the overall health of the network.

A healthy network delivers increased customer loyalty, higher quality leads, and a better reputation -- a major success factor, given today's popularity of "word of mouth" marketing. The growing relevance of LinkedIn, Facebook, bebo, twitter, and thousands of other social and professional networking tools creates an opportunity for individuals and companies to actively improve the quality of network relationships. Soon it won't be enough to be simply "connected" to a lot of people - the internet will soon connect us all. It will be the quality and relevance of the connections that are important. NRM also helps individuals and companies manage the blurring line between private and professional (doesn't everyone check facebook profiles before hiring now?) and recognize the much more complex business relationships between contract employees, consultants, suppliers, customers, media, and company "friends". In this new "networked world", CRM starts to look like a dinosaur.

"Whilst not exactly what you envisioned. We actually published the World's first ""NETWORK Relationship Management"", or NRM, System on the same day as you posted this Blog - see www.RelationshipGEM.com

It tracks who knows who and why for an entire network of Contacts - not just Customers. It does so without duplicating ANY data between records - even phone numbers. (It remembers who shares the same information instead.) So changing someone's home or work phone number will automatically change them for everyone else affected.

Is also acts as a unified communications centre enabling you to orriginate all phone calls, emails, faxes, letters - thus producing a consolidated history of everything your team does.